Last Tuesday, I sat nervously watching my grad student mentor read through my personal statement for the Marshall Scholarship both grateful and a little uneasy about the fact that she can “tell it like it is.” What I didn’t expect was that her one and only critique was to “show my gender more” in the paper and talk about how being a woman in science has impacted me. I told her I didn’t really want to do that. Not because I want to conceal my gender in any way, but because I didn’t think it would be honest to discuss my gender if I didn’t feel like it added to my personal story. Then later, in preparation for the Marshall Scholarship interview, I had a sort of consultation with the head of the Engineering Science department, Dr. Judith Todd who recommended immediately that I do some research into the state of women in science in the UK as compared to the US.
This whole application process in addition to a discussion I attended this week concerning the gender gap has made my head spin about gender bias in fields of science. To be honest, I haven’t really felt victimized by gender-driven prejudices in my field, but granted I am only an undergraduate. So, I decided to do my research, and found an eye-catching journal article published just last week. Two researchers from Cornell University recently discovered a 2:1 hiring preference in tenure-track STEM faculty positions for women. Two separate studies were performed with slight difference in format, but both involved supplying identical resumes with randomized gender assignments to a large sample of faculty members, and having the faculty members indicate their candidate preference. Both men and women faculty indicated a 2:1 preference for female candidates in the fields of biology, economics, engineering, and psychology. The only exception was male faculty in economics who did not show a significant gender bias in their preferences.
Infographic from 2015 study of Gender Bias in STEM Academia:
But that story is not entirely complete. Another highly cited article published only in 2012 in the same journal showed a significant bias in favor of men for hiring of PhD students in STEM fields. 127 faculty members in biology, chemistry, and physics received the exact same application (it was simply tweaked to fit the field of study) of an undergraduate student. The gender of the student was randomly assigned, and the gender was the only variable between applications. Faculty ranked the competence and hireability of the candidates as well as the amount of mentoring and salary they would offer the student. The favoring of the male candidate was statistically significant, and this held true regardless of whether the evaluator was male or female.
Graph depicting Gender Bias from 2012 study:
I don’t know about you, but I am thoroughly confused. What happened? Have the attitudes toward women in science taken a complete 180o turn since 2012? That seems somewhat unlikely. Or is the gender bias fundamentally different depending on what stage in an individual’s career it is evaluated? Do female students start out disadvantaged, only to become even more prized than men if they do in fact “make it” and manage to establish themselves in their field? Sadly, even the statistics don’t offer clear conclusions here.
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